Résumé
In recent years, the use of agent-based modeling to tackle complex societal issue has led to the massive use of data to better represent the targeted system. A key question in the development of such models is the definition of the initial population. If many tools and methods already exist to generate a synthetic population from global and sample data, very few are really used in the social simulation field. One of the major reason for this fact is the difficulty of use of the existing tools and the lack of integrated tools in the modeling platforms used by modelers. To tackle this issue, we present in this paper a new generic tool, called Gen*, allowing to generate, localize and structure by a social network a synthetic population, directly usable in the GAMA agent-based modeling and simulation platform through its modeling language. The paper presents in details the three components of Gen* (generation, localization, structuring) as well as their use in the GAMA platform.